Thursday, December 18, 2008

A Mea Culpa, Sort of.

I was thinking this morning about a story I read in middle school, about a woman that was confined in a room and went crazy when she saw things happening within the wallpaper. I remember wondering whether what was happening in the wallpaper was making her insane or whether it was not knowing why it was happening.

The man that broke up with me 16 (and yes, I'm still counting) days ago didn't tell me much about his prior relationships, but the two that I do know about both involved something about the other person being a bit crazy or psycho. Since I'm starting to feel a little crazy myself, this knowledge is sort of comforting. Maybe I'm not the only one that has gone through this with him. Maybe he bought all of us dinner and dumped us after the main course. Maybe none of us were crazy, after all.

But honestly, one can't help but feel a little loose at the hinges when the person who was could have become your everything suddenly becomes nothing. When eyes once filled with lust and caring are suddenly blank and disinterested. When the person that you talked to eight times a day suddenly goes stone cold and silent. You begin to wonder if you're stuck in an episode of the Twilight Zone where time has slipped and everyone knows what's going on except for you. And you then go insane trying to fill in the missing time.

I wrote a few days ago about getting drunk, waking up in the night after a bad dream thinking he had cheated on me and what it was like to deal with that lingering sour feeling as I tried to go about my life the next day. I had a friend, more of a facebook acquaintance really, call and want to commiserate and compare her own scheming, cheating ex. I felt really guilty as I was correcting her. I'm thinking what I wanted to express was lost on her. Maybe on anyone that bothers to read this damn thing.

So, to set the record straight, I know he didn't cheat on me. I don't know why I know, I just do. Of all of the negative things I feel about him now, I don't think of him as a cheat. Cold, bastard, jerk, asshole, liar, even maybe a certifiable goddamned sociopath, but not a cheat.

It might have actually been easier if he had cheated or wanted to move on to someone else. That would be something. A reason. Something tangible that I could hold in my hands and resent with every ounce of my being. Nothing, the absence of any reason at all, is so much harder to deal with.

When someone tells you that there is nothing wrong with you, but they have just quit loving you, the blow to the ego is unfathomable. You start examining every time you got crabby or lost your temper or forgot to brush your teeth or told a stupid joke or didn't have a smart thing to say at the right time. You feel dumb and ugly and uninteresting. Its a huge hole that it can take years to claw your way out of. If someone cheats or doesn't want kids or gets a new job and moves to BoraBora, its a bit of a stepladder out of that hole.

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Vital Statistics

If you were to ask me to describe myself in two words, I would say "bike dork." Mostly because "incurable smart ass" is three words.
On February 24, 2011, I celebrated my first year as a cancer survivor. With the structural integrity of my boob currently stabilized, it is back to writing about bikes and passing judgment on my fellow human beings.